Sunday, November 19, 2006

Hen Research

Chris and Linda Evans, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, have been studying chickens. It seems they're smarter than we thought:

When male chickens come across food, they make a “took, took, took” call to tell the flock – but hens react only if they don’t already know that food is around.

My chickens come running every time I open the back door, and make demanding clucks in the hope I'm going to feed them. But the animal behaviourists from Sydney think they're doing rather more than that:

“If you’re on a long drive and you pass a restaurant sign, that could be a salient piece of information. But if, after food has been brought to the table, someone says: ‘There’s food,’ that’s a redundant comment. It’s that kind of contrast,” Chris Evans explains.

In other words, this is not a Pavlov-type automatic response to a stimulus. Rather, there is a cognitive element which makes it more like human communication (I think it's going a bit far to liken it to language, as the New Scientist article does).

6 comments:

Chortle. I had to swap the chicken run round a couple of days ago, so for the first time the chooks had to get used to having the feeder on their left on their way up the ladder, rather than on their right. They were plunged into panic and stood in a huddle as darkness fell around them, and had to be rescued. And again the next night. I haven't dared to ask Witchypoo what happened tonight...